


the stars blinked out

by quint_whatever



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Hanahaki Disease, Minor Allura/Lance (Voltron), Multi, One-sided Klance, unhappy ending for keith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-25 00:03:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21108194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quint_whatever/pseuds/quint_whatever
Summary: Hanahaki disease: an illness born from one-sided love.Or: the one where Keith has a thing for Lance and can’t seem to stop coughing up flowers.





	the stars blinked out

The first time it happens, Keith is grateful he’s alone.

It’s late, and Keith is lying on his bed, the rest of the team retired away to their respective rooms after a long day of training. It starts as a tickle at the back of his throat. It’s like an itch he can’t scratch, getting more and more persistent, until he’s clawing at his neck to get it to stop. The pressure pushes up, up, up, until something soft and delicate lands on his tongue. He spits it out.

A small, pale blue flower. A five-petaled forget-me-not.

His stomach sinks.

Keith walks across the room, wraps the flower in tissues, and tosses it in the trash. He doesn’t have time for this.

***

“I could totally bench press Pidge,” Lance says.

They’re all on the training deck, well past daily warm ups and the day’s training. Shiro and Allura are off somewhere discussing their next course of action, Pidge, Hunk, and Lance are chatting away in the middle of the room, and Keith is off to the side, leaning against the wall and watching them with an ounce of interest.

Pidge scoffs. “I’m not that small.”

“Oh, dear pigeon, it’s not that you are small, but that I am strong.”

“Ah, yes. Your noodle arms make me quiver in my boots.”

“Hey!” Lance crosses his arms. “Hunk, back me up here.”

Hunk looks between Lance and Pidge, seemingly torn between choosing who he wants as an enemy for the day.

“Uhh…” Hunk spots Keith. “Keith! What do you think?”

Keith startles, his boots squeaking against the floor. 

“Yeah, mullet,” Lance says, falling to the floor and stretching out into an almost bench-pressing position. “Check out this solid form.”

His shirt rides up the littlest bit, exposing a line of skin, and Keith’s thoughts taper out into white noise. He stares for a few moments. Keeping his expression blank, the perfect poker face, Keith shrugs. “Test it and find out.” 

“You are _so_ on. Pidge,” Lance says, lifting his arms up high, “get on my hands.”

“Can I run and jump?” she asks.

“What?” Lance’s eyes go wide. “No way. You’ll break us.” 

“I think I’m gonna run and jump.”

“Don’t you _dare_.”

Pidge grins and steps a few feet back. She crouches down into a runner’s pose. “You ready?”

“Ohhh my God, Pidge, think about what you’re doing- ”

Pidge doesn’t heed his warning. She launches herself forward and jumps into the air, arms outstretched like she’s flying. For a split second, it looks like they’ll make it. Her small form falls into Lance’s hands, her hair rising up around her head like a halo, and for that brief moment of time, they look like a duet, like gymnasts, like two people immortalized in a statue. 

But then gravity is all like _sike_ and Pidge crashes onto the floor, her bony limbs stabbing Lance as they combine into a pile of failure on the floor. 

“Ow,” Lance mutters. “I think you broke my spleen.”

Pidge sits up and brushes non-existant dirt off of her sweater. She smiles. “That’s what you get for being arrogant, you big baby.”

Hunk makes a muffled noise behind them. It takes only a second for him to break his straight face, his loud laughter echoing out into the room, and Pidge follows soon after, her giggles turning into cackles as Lance rolls over, sitting up with a dazed look on his face. Lance looks at both of them. After a beat, Lance’s lips split into the biggest grin, his whole face lit up from being the cause. 

Keith watches them, an unfamiliar feeling blooming in his centre, making it feel like his chest is compressing and exploding at the same time. It’s different, but kind of nice; like a void is being filled inside of him. 

That’s when he starts coughing. 

Dry hacks wreck his lungs, like something’s trying to expel all the air inside of him. Keith tries to stop but can’t, a lump blocking his airway and forcing itself up into his mouth, and he knows what it means this time without having to spit it out. He turns his back to the others and lets the omen fall into the palm of his hand. There, lying innocently, are a couple more flowers than before, now a family of loveless forget-me-nots coloured a sweet and pretty blue.

A small whimper escapes from his throat. 

“Keith?” Lance asks, still sprawled on the floor. “You good man?”

Keith closes his fist around the flowers and prays they’ll stay hidden.

“I’m fine,” he chokes out. The words scratch his throat. He turns towards them and tells them he isn’t feeling too well, then books it to his room to figure his shit out in peace. Later on, when Shiro comes to see how he’s doing, Keith says he’s feeling better now.

To his relief, Shiro doesn’t question it.

***

More flowers show up. They start appearing every morning: a single handful of soft, blue petals, spit out onto his pillow or floor if he can’t make it to the toilet in time. He flushes them - he can’t leave any evidence behind. The burn in Keith’s lungs from the perpetual torment is manageable, only a bit achey and tight, although he can still feel it every time he moves, breathes, exists. 

One week later, during dinner, Keith feels the now familiar build up of something in his throat. 

They had recently visited a planet that thanked them with food grown from their planet - purple berries that burst when you bite into them and taste like watermelon. They each got their own little bowl along with their typical goo. Hunk finishes his first, commenting on how good it is, and it’s clear from the way he’s eyeing everyone else’s that he’d like more. Keith notices almost immediately, followed by Lance shortly after. 

Lance toys with he edge of his bowl, eyes unfocused and thinking, staring at nothing on the table. He turns to Hunk. “You can have mine, if you want” Lance says, sliding his bowl across from him. “I don’t really like them.”

It’s the the utter selflessness that does Keith in. The response from his lungs is aggressive and constricting and trying to suppress it would be futile. So, he hides his mouth and coughs into a napkin like he’s done the past few times he’s been around the others, used to the reaction every time Lance is himself. Keith folds it up as fast as he can, and out of the corner of his eye he sees a white corner painted red instead of the normal blue. 

Keith excuses himself and rushes to his room. That’s when his coughing fit really starts. He hacks and hacks and hacks. It sounds wet, broken, like his lungs are drowning in blood. This time, the flowers don’t stop coming. It’s one after another after another until he has enough for a full bouquet, enough to fill his hands and for some to spill off the edges. They’re speckled with red. Garnished with his blood. 

Keith doesn’t have to know a lot about hanahaki disease to understand that this is Bad™.

When blood starts coming out with the flowers, people see a doctor - stage lll has to be taken seriously, less the invasion of flowers onto other organs cause whole bodies to collapse. The roots are cut out, all romantic feelings for a specific person are lost, and everyone moves on with their lives. 

There are no doctors in space with them. Even if there were, Keith doubts he could swallow his pride long enough to ask one for help. If he doesn’t do something soon, though, he’ll…die.

His only option is to stop feeling.

No more soft smiles when he thinks Lance isn’t looking. No more watching as Lance kills it in training, and then runs around the room yelling in celebration. No more thinking, caring, any of that. No more loving. 

Loving. 

Is it love, though? He knows he’d die for Lance. Then again, he’d also die for anyone on the team. Keith won’t deny that he cares for him - if Lance is upset, it makes him feel off, almost like he’s upset, too, and if Lance is injured in a battle, his mind won’t stop running until he knows for sure that he’s okay. 

The worst is late at night. When Keith’s lying in on the thin mattress in his room, his inhibitions low enough for his thoughts to turn to the blue boy that makes all of their lives better. Often the thoughts won’t shut up. Keith’s hand running through Lance’s hair as he uses Keith’s lap as a pillow. Lance’s timid and shy smiles he’d save just for Keith. Their hands entwined, not made to fit but still fitting together anyways. 

When he looks at Lance, he feels an emotion that makes him want to keep going on, something that he hasn’t felt since he was a child.

Hope.

He’d die for everyone on the the team…but Lance is the only one he’d live for. 

Shit. Maybe he kinda-sorta-maybe loves the boy who holds the team together. Another coughing fit attacks his chest, the flowers nearly bloodying his sheets this time, and that’s the moment Keith knows that he’s totally, unequivocally fucked. 

***

One week passes. Nothing changes. It turns out that you can’t beat back emotions with logic, after all. 

It’s night again, and Keith is roaming the castle halls with his arms cradled around himself, sick to his stomach of his metallic smelling room that looks like a garden crime scene. All of the halls are empty. They’re cleaned so thoroughly that not a single speck of dust or dirt lines the walls or the floor - just perfect metal and Altean materials. It feels clinical. 

He makes it to the kitchen and fills a glass of water. When he shuts the tap off, he can hear a faint noise, like barely audible humming. Keith grabs his glass and follows it. The closer he gets, the clearer it sounds, the humming turning into voices - Allura’s and Lance’s. He rounds the corner and spots them. 

They’re both sitting near one of the observatory windows. Lance is sitting crossed legged beside her, his feet adorned with blue lion slippers and his shoulders covered in a blanket, Allura glued to his side with another blanket curled up around her so that only her face is showing. Lance’s hand rests on her knee, swirling little patterns into her pyjamas pants, slow and in no hurry. Like they have all the time in the world. Keith’s throat closes up.

“Are there oceans back on Earth?” Allura asks, practically whispers, her eyes staying trained on the infinite black space in front of them. Keith can tell from her tone of voice and their positions that he’s walked in on something private. 

“Yeah,” Lance replies with a soft smile. “The one behind my childhood home is my favourite. Everyone likes to romanticize the ocean as if it’s some clear and majestic thing, but sometimes, it’s not.” He shrugs. “There’s algae that coats your skin in green slime and sea urchins that’ll stab you if you’re not careful. And a wave could crash over you and drown your ass, or a shark could mistake you for its prey and bite your limbs off, and there’s so many dangers and threats, but…it’s still beautiful. Y’know?”

Keith should leave. Lance’s quiet and vulnerable voice fuses his feet to the floor though, so instead, he leans into the wall and prays they don’t notice him. He gives himself an F in moral integrity. 

Lance moves closer to Allura and lays his head on her shoulder. His soft breaths shift her hair, her white strands fluttering as if in a soft wind. “What kind of constellations did Altea have? Like, which one was your favourite?” 

“‘The Lovers’,” Allura says without needing to think. She shimmies her hand out from under the blanket and points it outside into the void. “My mom used to tell me about them as my bedtime story.” Her voice turns sad. “One of the lovers lived on the far left side of our sky, reaching out to the other on the far right, a line of stars making up their arms. In between them, the sky was always completely black, because no other stars dared block their path to each other.” She keeps her arm outstretched. “I always wanted their hands to meet.”

Lance lifts his own hand up, and the back of their knuckles brush in the air. Hesitantly, like she’s not sure if she should, like she’s not sure if she’s allowed to, Allura moves and entwines her fingers with his, their hands meeting. She squeezes and Lance does it back. He turns to her, the movement bringing their hands lower, and she reaches out to touch his cheek, the blankets falling off both of their shoulders.

Keith should really leave. He sees Lance glance down at her lips, and it’s the last straw for his lungs. 

It’s the worst pain he’s ever felt. He can feel them contracting and stretching and tearing, like they’re ripping apart, like they decided his body couldn’t contain them any longer. It aches and he clutches at his chest with one hand, clawing at his ribs as his other squeezes his glass of water so tight it’s a wonder it doesn’t crack. He closes his eyes and curses under his breath. The pressure starts building up low in his throat.

Keith opens his eyes just in time to Lance and Allura kiss.

He can’t think. He turns around and _runs_. He makes it a good distance before the coughing fit starts, and he knows that this time, it’ll probably only stop with his heart. Keith muffles the sound of it with his hand, but it makes the flowers burn even more on their way up, no longer soft and pretty but thorny and wilted, covered in his blood and coating the castle’s clean floors like a top coat. He can’t stop. The quiet sounds of it are horrible. They’re wet and pitiful, filling his section of air in the hall with his torment. There’s enough flowers at his feet to fill a whole botany shop.

The pain is whiting out his mind so when the world starts tilting, Keith lets it. He falls down as soft as he can, not willing to let Allura and Lance know he was here, but he can’t hold onto his glass strongly enough to stop it from smashing into the ground and shattering into a million tiny pieces. There’s water and glass and flowers and blood on every inch of the floor. 

Keith lets his forehead rest on the cool ground. The world blacks out and he welcomes it. 

***

Keith wakes up to the floor rushing towards him for second time. 

“Woah!” Lance says, securing his arms underneath him before Keith can take a bite out of the castle’s base. He grabs hold of Lance’s shoulder and pushes himself up. They’re in the medical bay, empty, as far as he can tell, and Keith is coherent enough to realize he’s just come out of a pod. His skin still feels icy. 

“What?” Keith asks, ever so eloquent. His voice feels scratchy, dry, like he hasn’t used it in days.

Lance doesn’t answer. He leads Keith over to the couch off to the side and brings him a bottle of altean tea, then comes back a second time with a blanket.

Someone must’ve found him. Someone on the team took him from his bloody, flowery grave, just in time to save his life, which also means that someone _knows_. Maybe they all do. 

Keith lets the blanket fall on his knees, not bothering to smooth it out. “Who put me in a pod?” he asks, bitting back a question he's too scared to voice, because he thinks he already knows the answer. 

“We should let the others know you’re up,” Lance says. “It’s been two days.”

Keith digs his fingernails into his palm. “It wasn’t…was it you?”

Lance closes in on himself. He gives Keith the littlest of nods. “Me and Allura heard something, so we went to check it out. We found you lying on the floor in a puddle of blood.” He wraps his arms around himself. “There were a bunch of flowers, too.”

_He knows_. Keith lowers his head, fingers fiddling with a loose thread on the blanket. Shame burns his cheeks like someone poured gasoline on them and struck a match. 

“I’m sorry.”

“I was so scared,” Lance whispers. “I thought-“ He takes a breath, swallows. “I thought you were dead.”

Just then, Keith notices how worn out Lance looks. His eyes are sunken, his hair is a mess, and there are wrinkles on his shirt that shouldn’t be there. 

Lance rubs at his face. “I was careless. I should’ve realized sooner.”

“It’s not your fault,” Keith mumbles.

“Not my fault? If I knew you had a crush on Allura, I wouldn’t have flirted with her in front of you. Maybe you wouldn’t have gotten so bad, or- or I don’t know, maybe it wouldn’t have acted up.”

“_What_?”

Keith remembers every time Lance flirted with Allura - little gestures, genuine compliments here and there, an abundance of bad pick-up lines. They would always fill Keith with a kind of detachment. He refused to think about them. It hurt too much for reasons he didn’t fully understand, so he numbed himself and looked the other way. Curiously, he doesn’t mind thinking about it right now.

“She doesn’t know what the flowers mean,” Lance adds. “Apparently, Alteans don’t get it, those lucky quiznaks.”

“I don’t think you’re using that word correctly,” Keith mutters. 

“I so am!” His defensiveness lasts all but one second before dropping back into a sort of quiet contemplation. “She thinks it’s just a normal human disease. If you want to tell her what it really is, it’s your choice. I’m okay with it.” 

“That’s…generous of you.” Keith looks up. “Do the others know?”

“Nah. I cleaned up the flowers before anyone came and just told them you passed out. Pidge wouldn’t stop interrogating me and ‘Lura over it, but we didn’t tell her.”

“Allura was fine with lying?”

“Well…no, but I told her it was for a good reason. She trusts me.”

Keith prepares for that statement to sting, to hurt, to make him feel like he’s ingested poison, but…there’s nothing. He doesn’t care. 

“Thanks.”

“No problem.” Lance sits down on the other side of the couch, the two cushions in the middle feeling a canyon of distance stretching between them. “I almost don’t want to ask, but…how are you feeling? Did the pods get rid of the roots?”

Keith looks at Lance, and his heart doesn’t skip a beat like it has for the past few months. There’s no urge to protect, no desire to help, not even the longing for a friendship. It’s an absence of feeling; there’s a gap where his love used to live, filled with apathy and indifference. He looks at Lance, and can’t find anything there that’s worth it. 

_Oh_. Chills rack his skin, and something like loss hits him when he realizes it - there’s a secret people never share, something the doctors never tell you before putting you under. The removal of the roots doesn’t just take away romantic love.

It takes all of it.

“…Yeah. I think so,” Keith says.

“Oh. That’s good.” Lance’s eyes widen. “I just mean- I mean that it would be better, like, it wouldn’t hurt anymore.”

Keith forces a smile onto his dry lips. “Yeah. I got that.”

Lance smiles back.

Lance goes to tell the others he’s woken up. In the meantime, Keith sits on the couch, trying to feel even a little bit of something for Lance. Trying to feel _anything_. He brings up an image of him laughing in his mind, another image of him happy, one of him smiling and telling jokes, and Keith feels…nothing. Try as he might, there’s a perpetual void there - for all his emotions care, the boy he once loved and who gave him hope now doesn’t mean a thing. 

The team welcomes Keith back with teary eyes and poorly concealed worry. Things go back to normal. 

The only thing that really changes, besides Keith’s lack of everything for their blue paladin, is how he feels at night. Before the roots were taken out, he could feel something in his chest. Hope. Motivation. Love, maybe. Now, though, all of that’s gone, and its lack is apparent. They always said that once the disease was cured, every thing would be so easy, and the victims could move on like nothing even happened in the first place. There’d be no more pain. But, if that’s the case…

Why does this lack of love hurt so much? Why does he feel so hollow?

Why does it feel like he’s lost something of great importance?

**Author's Note:**

> thought I'd try my take on this??  
also: kudos & comments fuel my life source, just saying ;)


End file.
